Administration & Society

This essay explores the forms that organizational democracy might take in public administration and argues that organizational democracy need not be incompatible with principles of representative democracy. Democratizing work life in public organizations is viewed as a way to develop members' interpersonal skills, decrease buck-passing, increase job satisfaction, productivity, and public-bureaucratic contacts, recruit talented leadership, and engender more creative solutions to pubiic problems. Barriers to work democratization in public bureaucracy derive from the prevailing political arrangements; the needs, habits, and interests of organizational elites; the folkways and organizational ideologies found in public bureaucracies; the bureaucratic socialization and reward system; and the competitive impact of alternative "change models." Despite these obstacles, potential opportunities for structural change that may be unique to public as against large-scale private organizations are discernible, suggesting that a change strategy fostering organizational democracy by accretion or encroaching control has some likelihood of long-run success.

After briefly noting several problem areas for students of unionization, the authors focus on public employee perceptions of union impacts in five states. State public employee unions were found to be occupationally quite different from other public and private sector unions, with professional employees predominating. Stages of union development also emerged, with the breadth of union membership and the number of employees covered by union contracts being the key descriptive variables. The developmental stages were also found to be directly related to whether and how unions had affected their working conditions.

This note uses information collected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to assess the quantity and quality of employment of American Indians in that agency. There is a clear-cut pattern of stratification within the BIA, with Indians restricted largely to lower-status positions. Analysis reveals that this stratification is not imply a result of application of merit standards for advancement, for Indian employees are approximately two employment grade levels below non-Indian employees with the same amounts of education and agency experience.

New public participation programs have been enacted in the federal bureaucracy in the last 15 years; these programs intend to broaden the diversity and range of interests participating in agency affairs. to bring citizens into policy planning and to encourage greater ageney sensitivity to citizen interests. One explanation for the apparent failure to achieve these objectives in current programs is that advocates have not based goals on sound empirical and theoretical grounds. A number of propositions, based on program experience, are suggested because they seem to offer a more satisfactory description and explanation of program accomplishment .

This short essay is a rejoinder to the article by H. George Frederickson titled "The Lineage of the New Public Administration, " which appeared in the August 1976 issue of Administration and Society.